Strategic Migration Diplomacy: The Gambia's negotiations on migration controls before and after Democratisation

In the last decades, European governments have sought to restrict and control immigration into the Schengen area by externalising migration controls beyond the EU’s territory, concluding agreements with countries as located as far as Sub-Saharan Africa. These agreements have been linked to visa policies, development cooperation, and questions of security, amongst other issues. The paper proposed, building on my ongoing PhD project, examines why countries relying on readmission and hosting refugees engage in this type of agreement, and how their conclusion and implementation have been linked to other issue areas in their relations with the EU, its member states and the former colonisers. Specifically, it aims to answer the research questions of how and to what extent societal groups’ preferences and domestic institutions shape a government's migration diplomacy in the context of Europe’s externalisation of migration controls (Adamson and Tsourapas 2019). Applying a theoretical framework guided by republican liberalism (Moravcsik 1997), it understands a government’s interests in international relations as a function of the dominant societal groups’ preferences and the domestic institutions moderating which groups benefit from (privileged) access to the government. On the international level, the theoretical approach of Extraversion, as introduced by Bayart (2006), will be utilized. It sees African post-colonial heads of government as strategically using their foreign relations and their status’ as representatives of sovereign states to access external resources and strengthen their domestic positions. This approach also stresses that formal institutions, as inherited by colonial occupiers, have been transformed and altered by informal practices of various origins ranging from pre-colonial to post-colonial experiences (Niang 2018). Hence, seeking to answer the questions lined up above, both formal and informal domestic institutions will be included in the analysis. Applying this approach to the case of The Gambia, the paper examines how different societal interest groups have been influencing the government’s diplomacy concerning emigration, involuntary returns and refugee hosting before and after the country's return to democracy in 2016. The comparatively small Western African state is not only continuously hosting varying numbers of refugees from Senegal’s Casamance region for several decades; its citizens represent a small yet compared to its general population group of irregular migrants aiming to reach the EU; it has also implemented a moratorium on involuntary returns of its citizens in 2019 (Zanker and Altrogge 2022). Therefore, the country constitutes an interesting case to examine how societal groups’ preferences and different institutional arrangements influence governments’ interests in foreign relations. The analysis will build mainly on expert interviews with personnel in academia, the bureaucracy as well as non-governmental and international organisations to be conducted in The Gambia between March and Mai of 2023. The wider trends in agreement conclusion and The Gambia’s representativeness will be examined using the newly released Strategic Migration Policy - HD.SMP 1.0, a comprehensive dataset which compiles different types of migration agreements concluded by the EU and its member states.